Essays on eugenics

With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 , eugenicists for the first time played an important role in the Congressional debate as expert advisers on the threat of "inferior stock" from eastern and southern Europe. [44] [ verification needed ] The new act, inspired by the eugenic belief in the racial superiority of "old stock" white Americans as members of the " Nordic race " (a form of white supremacy ), strengthened the position of existing laws prohibiting race-mixing. [45] Eugenic considerations also lay behind the adoption of incest laws in much of the . and were used to justify many anti-miscegenation laws . [46]

Although Roosevelt was known as a trust buster, his ultimate goal was not the destruction of big business but its regulation. For Roosevelt the concentration of industry in ever fewer hands represented not just a threat to fair markets but also to democracy as wealthy industrialists consolidated power in their own hands. He turned to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to challenge business monopolies, bringing suit against the Northern Securities Company (a railroad trust) in 1902. The Justice Department initiated forty-two additional anti-trust cases during his presidency. During Roosevelt’s second term, regulating business became increasingly important. Roosevelt had always believed big business was an inevitable economic development; regulation was a means to level the playing field and provide the “square deal” to citizens, as Roosevelt had promised in his re-election campaign. He supported laws like the 1906 Hepburn Act, which regulated the railroads, and the same year’s Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Acts, which controlled the drug and food industries.